Walmart lost one chief technology officer to Pinterest, they’ve more than made up for that by hiring former Amazon, Microsoft and Google techie Suresh Kumar in their fight to beat Jeff Bezos company. Every step that Amazon takes, Walmart is right behind not willing to be left behind.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is coming under more fire from Alex Stamos who feels it’s time for him to step down and let the adults run the show. Students at the University of Colorado were shocked to learn in a news report that they had been used in a facial recognition study without their knowledge. This only expands the ethical arguments about this technology which keeps coming under fire.

Welcome Suresh Kumar, Watch Those Falling Prices

Walmart has
hired a tech veteran whose resume includes stints at Amazon, Microsoft and
Google for a newly elevated position of chief technology officer and chief
development officer.

Suresh Kumar, who was most
recently at Google as its vice president and general manager of display, video,
app ads and analytics, will report directly to Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon.

The moves come as Walmart
is trying to compete better with Amazon and other technology companies.

Walmart Inc.’s former
chief technology officer Jeremy King left the company in March to join
Pinterest. The retailer emphasized that Kumar is not a replacement for King but
rather assumes a much larger global role and will set the company’s technical
strategy. King had reported to Walmart’s U.S e-commerce chief Marc Lore.

Time To Step Down Zuckerberg

Facebook’s
former security chief is disagreeing with calls to break up the social network.

Instead, Alex Stamos
believes the way to fix problems is for Mark Zuckerberg to step aside as CEO.

Stamos left Facebook last
year as the company dealt with fallout from bogus information spread on its
social network. He spoke this week at
a technology conference in Toronto.

Global Payments Acquires Total
System Services

Global
Payments will buy Total System Services in an all-stock deal valued at $21.5
billion, the third major acquisition in the payment technology sector this
year.

Traditional payment
processors like Global Payments are consolidating as they compete increasingly
with upstarts like PayPal and Square, which is led by Twitter co-founder Jack
Dorsey.

In March, Fidelity
National Information Services said it would buy Worldpay for about $35 billion.
In January, Fiserv bought First Data in a $22 billion all-stock deal.

The payment service
industry works behind the scenes to help complete the process for purchases. It
was a simpler exercise when those transactions took place in person with a
swipe of a card. But transactions have largely moved online and grown in
complexity, forcing those background players to deal with multiple currencies,
various forms of payment and more at lightning speed. The industry also faces a
growing base of startup competitors.

Under the agreement
announced Tuesday, Total System shareholders will receive 0.8101 Global
Payments shares for each share of TSYS common stock, about a 20% premium to
TSYS’s common share price at the close of business on May 23, 2019.

Upon expected closing in
the final quarter of 2019, Global Payments shareholders will own 52% of the
combined company, and TSYS shareholders will own 48%.

The company, which will
keep the Global Payments name, says it will provide payment and software
technology to about 3.5 million small-to-mid-sized business and more than 1,300
financial institutions in 100 countries. Global Payments said the combined
entity would process more than 50 billion transactions annually.

TSYS had revenue of $4
billion in 2018, while processing more than 32.3 billion financial
transactions. Global payments also had revenue of about $4 billion last year.

The board of directors
will be made up of six directors from each company and Global Payments CEO Jeff
Sloan will be the chief executive of the combined company. TSYS CEO Troy Woods
will become chairman of the board.

Global Payments is based
in Atlanta and TSYS is based in Columbus, Georgia. The company will maintain
dual headquarters.

Shares in Total System Services
Inc. rose about 4% in premarket trading and shares of Global Payments Inc. fell
by about the same.

Facial Recognition Intrusion On U of
Colorado Campus

More than
1,700 people walking on a University of Colorado campus were unknowingly
photographed as part of a facial recognition research project funded by U.S.
intelligence and military agencies, a newspaper reported.

Professor Terrance Boult
set up a long-range surveillance camera in an office window at the Colorado
Springs campus.

It captured more than
16,000 images of passers-by during the spring semesters of 2012 and 2013, The
Denver Postreported Monday.

The research project,
which was first reported by the Colorado Springs
Independent , received funding from U.S. intelligence and
military agencies, including the Office of Naval Research and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence.

Boult’s research examined
whether facial recognition algorithms could meet standards for use by the U.S.
Navy. The research then aimed to improve the technology after Boult’s team
found it wasn’t up to par.

“The study is trying to
make facial recognition better, especially at long range or surveillance
applications,” Boult said. “We wanted to collect a dataset of people acting
naturally in public because that’s the way people are trying to use facial
recognition.”

The camera recorded people
who were walking on the west lawn of the campus from about 490 feet (150
meters) away. The images resulted in 1,732 unique identities. The dataset was
made publicly available online in 2016 and was taken down last April.

Boult said he waited five
years to release the dataset online to protect student privacy.

The university’s
Institutional Review Board also examined the research protocol for the project,
university spokesman Jared Verner said in a statement.

“No personal information
was collected or distributed in this specific study,” Verner said. “The
photographs were collected in public areas and made available to researchers
after five years when most students would have graduated.”

The project raises
questions about whether technological advancement is crossing ethical
boundaries, said Bernard Chao, a University of Denver law professor, who
teaches the intersection of law and technology.

Jeffrey Lang joined Movie TV Tech Geeks for 2015 and has been providing his opinion on technology from his hometown London. Along with having many opinions on tech, gadgets, games, etc., he enjoys watching the Thames from our satellite office there.

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